“For there are three who bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one.” 1 John 5:7
Most of my life I believed in a God. I grew up going to church on Sundays and hearing all the bible stories in Sunday School. I knew it all, or so I thought… Here is the God I thought I knew: a wrathful, angry God who made a bunch of rules for people to follow until one day His kind, loving Son stepped in the way of His Fathers wrath to save us feeble humans. Once the Son had to leave us then we were given a mysterious, confusing Spirit to help guide us; and yet even with this guide the world seemed to get more and more evil each day. This you see is a very altered way to see God, and yet it is how many of us see Him.
I want to share how I know Him now, because it is nothing like how I knew him then…
GOD THE FATHER:
As a child I had many questions about the sentence: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?” It was always explained to me that God had to leave Jesus because Jesus took on all the sin of the world and God was too holy to be around that amount of sin. This always made me doubt God’s love for me, and was even left me questioning Him after I decided to follow him diligently. If God left His own Son, then surely He’d leave me.
It took me a while but one day I realized that Jesus was human. I pretty well-known fact, but once I realized this I began to see that in that human body; He experienced everything that we have. Sure maybe not in the same way as us but every feeling we have ever felt, Jesus has also felt it. This is why we often feel that Jesus is more relatable to us than God, because He was actually on the earth with us.
How many times have you been in a situation and felt like God wasn’t with you? I know I can speak for myself and say that there are plenty of times that it seems all of hell is waging war against me and I hear nothing from God. Sometimes I am numb to what is going on around me, I like to pretend that isn’t there so it will go away. And sometimes it gets so bad that my only option left is to cry out to Him. The feeling of abandonment and rejection by God… my whole world is falling a part and my God has forsaken me… or at least that’s the feeling anyway.
Scripture makes it clear that God has our back, Hebrews 13:5 says “… I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Literally every story in scripture is concerning people whom God cherished and remembered, even when they did nothing to deserve it. So how much more does the perfect Man of God deserve to be heard by His Father. Just like us today; Jesus felt abandoned by God, but God never left Jesus. It just felt like He had.
For me this was a huge revelation about God. The act of love that was portrayed by Jesus was also through The Father. 1 John 4:7 says “… God is love…” It was never a loving Savior and an angry God, but one loving God. Immediately after realizing this, I bust out into tears and began to repent. I realized that I was harboring resentment towards God for forsaking His Son. The question to ask yourself is are you doing the same?
GOD THE SON:
Jesus is, to put it loosely, the dopest man to ever walk the earth. I could go on and on about how incredible He is. ‘He who knew no sin became sin’… all for us. Why has this act of love become so mundane to us? We walk around every single day knowing the full truth and power behind the gospel of Jesus, but have we ever sat to truly think about the goodness of our Savior Jesus? What would happen if we activated that kind of faith in our daily walk?
There are so many lessons we can learn from Jesus. He is our example of what christian should look like. 1 John 2:6 says “whoever abides in Him ought to walk in the same way as He walked.” What a strong statement! He is basically saying if you call yourself a christian and are not striving to be like Christ every second of every day then you are in the wrong.
In the trinity Christ is our earthly example. God gave a piece of Himself to us to show us how to live our lives. John 3:16 is one of the most well-known scripture in the Bible, it says: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” In essence we should be thanking God for Himself.
GOD THE HOLY GHOST:
If I am one hundred percent honest with myself, I do not think I will ever fully understand the Holy Spirit. I don’t think many people will, and it is because of this that I believe in my God. The fact that I cannot fully comprehend Him in this small space between my ears shows me of a higher, all-knowing power. This is where my faith comes in.
The Holy Spirit was so confusing to me before… I remember being a kid and laying in bed at night or playing in my room and hearing this unfamiliar tongue come from downstairs. I would peak my head out of my door to listen to would sit perplexed because I couldn’t make out this foreign language that my parents were speaking. As I got older I did not know the Holy Spirit for myself, He was always there but I never thought twice about Him.
Now that I am familiar with the power behind Him I am able to look back on my life and see where He guided me and kept me safe. There were moments when I should’ve got in some major trouble and didn’t. And some times when I honestly could’ve died and didn’t. He has always kept an eye on me, my whole entire life I have been guarded.
His voice is so incredibly soft that if you weren’t listening for it, you wouldn’t know it was there. He is that gut feeling we get when we know something isn’t right. He is the conscience voice we hear when He is warning us. He is that peaceful feeling you get when the storm is surrounding you but you know you’re going to be okay. He loves to sit and talk with us, comfort us, and direct us. To know Him is to know God.
The Spirit of the Lord abides in us. He is with us at all times. When we are worshiping at church and when we in the midst of sin. He gives us the confidence we need in order to carry out the calling that God has placed on us. Acts 18:9-10 says “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack or harm you.
God is God. There is no other. There is no comparison. There is no equal to. God is God, with three separate traits to help us in three separate ways. Do not allow the enemy to make you think that all three parts are not as good as the other. Such lies will lead to divided thinking about God, and will trickle down into your life and own person.
If we take it back all the way to the book of Genesis chapter one we see God say in verse twenty-six “Let Us make man in Our image…” We are made in the image of the three persons of A singular God. The enemy would want nothing more than to ruin your image of your Savior. Don’t let him lie to you.
-V
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